But they couldn't make an arrest because the only eyewitnesses wouldn't cooperate. The case remained open until the recently formed Cold Case Unit took another look last year.

The investigators found the two living witnesses who were at Jarrell's home on Dec. 3, 1990. A group had been at the residence on South Moody Swamp Road, talking, arm wrestling and drinking whiskey and beer when Jarrell was shot.

“The witnesses were uncooperative, and gave different accounts of what happened,” said Tuscaloosa County Metro Homicide Unit commander Capt. Loyd Baker.

Twenty-two years ago, they told police that Jarrell had fired the gun himself, either intentionally or accidentally. The Tuscaloosa News, which rarely covers suicides, contains no record of his death, with the exception of a small obituary that ran a week later.

Two of the witnesses, now in their late 50s and early 60s, gave investigators the real story of what happened when contacted within the last few months, Baker said. Both implicated Billy Joe Johnson, an Oakman man who died in 2001.

One witness said that he saw Johnson, who was 48 when he died, holding a shotgun after the two had struggled during a fight. The other witnesses said she had heard someone say Johnson had confessed. Investigators located and interviewed that person, who confirmed Johnson had confessed.

A Tuscaloosa County grand jury heard the evidence in December and agreed that there would be cause to charge Johnson if he were alive. The issued an abatement, which means the case is closed and won't proceed because the suspect has died.

The case is one of several that the three-man Cold Case Unit has cracked since they formed in May 2012.

A grand jury is expected to consider a 1978 murder case and a domestic poisoning case from 1974 in which the suspect is already dead, said Baker. He declined to give further details about those cases.

In October, investigators charged Alton Hyche in the 2008 killing of his wife Penny Hyche. (The suspect is not the same Alton Hyche who has served as Brookwood's mayor since 1977.) Hyche told authorities in 2008 that a gun accidentally discharged on a rural gas well road off Pegues Creek Road in Brookwood as the couple was returning from a fishing trip. Further interviews and ballistics tests led to a grand jury indictment. Hyche has pleaded not guilty in the pending case against him.

Later in October, a grand jury indicted Terry Ray “Tico” Snow in the 1987 shooting death of James Lee Tilley. Tilley was shot five times as he walked on a rural road in western Tuscaloosa County. The unit interviewed former witnesses, new witnesses and reexamined the evidence before presenting the case to a grand jury that indicted Snow, who was already being held in state prison on an attempted murder conviction.

The unit is still working to determine the identity of a woman who was found dead on a Vance road in 1979. Police suspect that the killer is the same man who was convicted of a very similar murder in nearby Jefferson County, but still haven't identified the victim more than 30 years later.